4 ms·

Forget country of origin. It seems that most websites don't even acknowledge the existence of multilingual countries: You are in Switzerland, you must speak Ger

Forget country of origin. It seems that most websites don't even acknowledge the existence of multilingual countries: You are in Switzerland, you must speak German; Belgium, here is some French; Canada, I guess that makes you Anglophone. It reminds me of a comment on an article about one of the giants (Google perhaps) who did not correctly handle capitalization rules for Dutch last names and capitalized "van", etc. Someone said something along the lines of "it's the height of corporate arrogance when a company treats your entire country and identity as an edge case." How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is. A UK person in Qatar is way too far. Even a Francophone in North America seems to be too far for most services.

lancebeet 5y ago
Until a couple of years ago, google's date picker for custom range search only worked if your locale was set to use the American date format. If your locale used any other other format, it would flip them around and give you a completely different time range. It always amused me how just a couple of clicks from their main product was a case they probably didn't even test for any non-US date formats, and cared so little about it that it took them years to fix it, despite bug reports. In that case, almost all of the non-US world was the edge case.
manojlds 5y ago
They do acknowledge multi lingual countries like India.
- vidarh 5y ago
  When they're big enough, sure. But I've spent months of my life telling various US based employers all the ways their assumptions about languages were wrong, and it was often a weird level of blindness where they'd be aware of some exceptions but fail to realise the same pattern repeats lots of places. You'd see companies with separate Spanish versions of their US services still struggle to deal with the existence of Switzerland, for example.
  - Mordisquitos 5y ago
    If you really want to blow their minds, show them websites of the Government of Spain, which have separate versions in Basque, Catalan (+ Valencian) and Galician as well as in Spanish.
nbadg 5y ago
And if you're multilingual within "monolingual" countries, especially the US, good luck. (microrant: there's no such thing as a monolingual country, and the US has no official language!) I've gotten emails from multiple bigtechs -- dropbox was one IIRC -- that were half in German, half in English. Or more relevant to Netflix -- your language setting for content has to be the same as your language setting for the UI. I'm sure to some people these things seem like nitpicks, but that's exactly the problem: treating language as an afterthought is such a profoundly middle class white American view. The vast majority of the world works differently, and most tech firms simply don't care. This isn't something trivial. It's a core part of how people interact with the world.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > Or more relevant to Netflix -- your language setting for content has to be the same as your language setting for the UI. Yeah, it sucks! How hard is it to have a general UI language setting and per-profile content language preferences? I usually set everything to English but that means my family can't use my Netflix.
- sellyme 5y ago
  > I've gotten emails from multiple bigtechs -- dropbox was one IIRC -- that were half in German, half in English. There is one website I use that sends emails when a staff member takes an action on your account (an extremely common and expected behaviour, something that can happen multiple times a day). The only problem is that these emails are localised to the language setting of the staff member who performed the action, not the language setting of the person actually receiving the email!
pronik 5y ago
There are different kinds of multilingual. English-German, French-Spanish, Italian-Spanish, basically there is no problem when your languages are co-located. However, try leading a proper multilingual life if you are German-Russian. You couldn't buy a DVD or BluRay with both languages. With streaming, it gets a bit beter, Netflix is actually one of the better players in the market -- more often than not, they do have a Russian translation and subtitles both for their own productions as well as licensed stuff. Disney+ in Germany doesn't seem to have Russian at all, even though they obviously own Russian translations (NB: no streaming service has managed to offer multiple video tracks, i.e. with localized signs in animated films). Maybe this will change when they enter the Russian market (should be this autumn), but again: why does this have to matter to me, living in Germany? The list goes on and on: there is no Russian in Amazon, i.e. Alexa won't understand Russian and also won't understand the titles of any music tracks in Russian (or Japanese for that matter). There is an Alexa equivalent from Yandex called Alice, but you'll be right to guess that I can't just import it to Germany, since it requires geo-blocked russian services to function. It's infuriating, but I guess that's the price we pay for letting US drive the innovation. Just give me a service where I can pay a €5 per video track, €1 per audio track and €0.50 for a subtitle track with a full catalog of movies and languages from the whole world. Then I can assemble my own Fight Club with English, German and Japanese dubs and Russian, Swedish and Swahili subs without having to resort to piracy.
- orloffm 5y ago
  Alisa (on Station Mini) works perfectly in Poland.
- Haga 5y ago
  You wouldn't pirate a working service.
- yupyup54133 5y ago
  The going rate for bulk DVDs on Ebay is 36 American cents[1] a piece. My recommendation (and what I do) would be to set up a Plex server[2], buy 2000 DVDs, rip the DVDs to your server, and import any needed subs from online[3]. You can also upscale the DVDs to 720p quality using FFMPEG's implementation of the nnedi3 neural network AI[4] (example script[5]). [1]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/332587500166?hash=item4d6fc28286:g:BngAAOSwGIRXcDjO https://www.ebay.com/itm/332587500166?hash=item4d6fc28286:g:... [2]:https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-290-p0043w-owners-thread/2829 https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-290-p0043w-own... [3]:https://support.plex.tv/articles/200471133-adding-local-subtitles-to-your-media/ https://support.plex.tv/articles/200471133-adding-local-subt... [4]:https://github.com/dubhater/vapoursynth-nnedi3 https://github.com/dubhater/vapoursynth-nnedi3 [5]:https://github.com/frypatch/plex-media-optimizer https://github.com/frypatch/plex-media-optimizer
mvanbaak 5y ago
Sony PSN does show the 'van' in some places, and not in others. Apple, same story. Google, same story. Sometimes when it is supported, they capitalize it. It's a mess.
sambe 5y ago
People started to get a clue about this 5-10 years ago though. It used to be much worse. I recall having to deal with it daily and I don't think about it much any more - more like a weekly exception. In fact, now also I get some places trying to be too helpful to the point of being confusing. For example, a trainer store that auto-detects location and lists prices in GBP but sizes in US (without indication) and doesn't actually have an EU/UK distribution centre. So whoops it's going to take ages to arrive, it gets re-listed in USD at the final checkout, whoops again, 3% charge from my credit card, and then the wrong size arrives. But at least I knew the rough GBP amount!
mam3 5y ago
When is the last time you paid for a google service tho ? Its the height of millenial arrogance to think a compagny should give you a special treatment for free
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  Last time? About two months ago. Sidenote, I am not Dutch. Are you implying that Dutch people don't buy any services from Google?
  - mam3 5y ago
    Ok for you... I was mostly saying most people don't pay in general for google products and yet complain about google
Fnoord 5y ago
In World of Warcraft, the Dutch word kunt gets censored because it is a variation of an English curseword. While in Dutch its a very basic word ('can' as in 'you can'). Customer Service rep. was aware of the issue but could not do anything about it. They are going to use AI in the game more for such moderation, so I hold my breath. Also, not sure what Spanish implies but Portuguese usually means Brazilian Portuguese. Dutch usually means Dutch, not Flemish, unless its a Belgian production.
- markenqualitaet 5y ago
  In the chat or in-game storry telling and such? Isn't 'cunt' also used much more casually in the UK and Australia? Cursewords and women's nipples... has their devilish impact on society ever been proven or rather is there even any evidence whatsoever? Why do we accept this idiotic censorship again?
xyzzy21 5y ago
Likely people at these companies never grokked that Localization is both nation and language - they conflate the two. That's a sad level of stupid.
blacklion 5y ago
> How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is. Exactly rule we've deduced with my wife in our trips in South-East Asia and out living in Russia. Fun story: In the middle of nowhere in Myanmar we'd stopped to eat in roadside shack (we'd travelled by motorcycle). Food was delicious, and my wife looked up Google Maps while we waited for ordered second dish. To our surprise, this shack was listed on GMaps. We wrote good review, why not? Google Map asks several additional questions, like «Is this place popular among the college crowd» and «Is this place wheelchair-accessible». Nearest college is about 500km to this place, 0.01% of children go to college, and wheelchairs, of course, could be pushed to this shack, as it has ground floor. I mean, no floor at all. It was very funny indeed. But most of the time same service behavior is not funny, but irritating.
LordAtlas 5y ago
As an Indian, it's especially annoying when websites just assume that I want the website in Hindi. We have 22 languages officially recognised in the Constitution, and a few hundred regional dialects, and Hindi is only spoken by 40% of the population. A lower percentage even reads it. I'm good with English, thanks. It's what I think in.

lancebeet 5y ago

Until a couple of years ago, google's date picker for custom range search only worked if your locale was set to use the American date format. If your locale used any other other format, it would flip them around and give you a completely different time range. It always amused me how just a couple of clicks from their main product was a case they probably didn't even test for any non-US date formats, and cared so little about it that it took them years to fix it, despite bug reports. In that case, almost all of the non-US world was the edge case.

manojlds 5y ago

They do acknowledge multi lingual countries like India.

vidarh 5y ago
When they're big enough, sure. But I've spent months of my life telling various US based employers all the ways their assumptions about languages were wrong, and it was often a weird level of blindness where they'd be aware of some exceptions but fail to realise the same pattern repeats lots of places. You'd see companies with separate Spanish versions of their US services still struggle to deal with the existence of Switzerland, for example.
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  If you really want to blow their minds, show them websites of the Government of Spain, which have separate versions in Basque, Catalan (+ Valencian) and Galician as well as in Spanish.

nbadg 5y ago

And if you're multilingual within "monolingual" countries, especially the US, good luck. (microrant: there's no such thing as a monolingual country, and the US has no official language!) I've gotten emails from multiple bigtechs -- dropbox was one IIRC -- that were half in German, half in English. Or more relevant to Netflix -- your language setting for content has to be the same as your language setting for the UI. I'm sure to some people these things seem like nitpicks, but that's exactly the problem: treating language as an afterthought is such a profoundly middle class white American view. The vast majority of the world works differently, and most tech firms simply don't care. This isn't something trivial. It's a core part of how people interact with the world.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> Or more relevant to Netflix -- your language setting for content has to be the same as your language setting for the UI. Yeah, it sucks! How hard is it to have a general UI language setting and per-profile content language preferences? I usually set everything to English but that means my family can't use my Netflix.
sellyme 5y ago
> I've gotten emails from multiple bigtechs -- dropbox was one IIRC -- that were half in German, half in English. There is one website I use that sends emails when a staff member takes an action on your account (an extremely common and expected behaviour, something that can happen multiple times a day). The only problem is that these emails are localised to the language setting of the staff member who performed the action, not the language setting of the person actually receiving the email!

pronik 5y ago

There are different kinds of multilingual. English-German, French-Spanish, Italian-Spanish, basically there is no problem when your languages are co-located. However, try leading a proper multilingual life if you are German-Russian. You couldn't buy a DVD or BluRay with both languages. With streaming, it gets a bit beter, Netflix is actually one of the better players in the market -- more often than not, they do have a Russian translation and subtitles both for their own productions as well as licensed stuff. Disney+ in Germany doesn't seem to have Russian at all, even though they obviously own Russian translations (NB: no streaming service has managed to offer multiple video tracks, i.e. with localized signs in animated films). Maybe this will change when they enter the Russian market (should be this autumn), but again: why does this have to matter to me, living in Germany? The list goes on and on: there is no Russian in Amazon, i.e. Alexa won't understand Russian and also won't understand the titles of any music tracks in Russian (or Japanese for that matter). There is an Alexa equivalent from Yandex called Alice, but you'll be right to guess that I can't just import it to Germany, since it requires geo-blocked russian services to function. It's infuriating, but I guess that's the price we pay for letting US drive the innovation. Just give me a service where I can pay a €5 per video track, €1 per audio track and €0.50 for a subtitle track with a full catalog of movies and languages from the whole world. Then I can assemble my own Fight Club with English, German and Japanese dubs and Russian, Swedish and Swahili subs without having to resort to piracy.

orloffm 5y ago
Alisa (on Station Mini) works perfectly in Poland.
Haga 5y ago
You wouldn't pirate a working service.
yupyup54133 5y ago
The going rate for bulk DVDs on Ebay is 36 American cents[1] a piece. My recommendation (and what I do) would be to set up a Plex server[2], buy 2000 DVDs, rip the DVDs to your server, and import any needed subs from online[3]. You can also upscale the DVDs to 720p quality using FFMPEG's implementation of the nnedi3 neural network AI[4] (example script[5]). [1]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/332587500166?hash=item4d6fc28286:g:BngAAOSwGIRXcDjO https://www.ebay.com/itm/332587500166?hash=item4d6fc28286:g:... [2]:https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-290-p0043w-owners-thread/2829 https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-290-p0043w-own... [3]:https://support.plex.tv/articles/200471133-adding-local-subtitles-to-your-media/ https://support.plex.tv/articles/200471133-adding-local-subt... [4]:https://github.com/dubhater/vapoursynth-nnedi3 https://github.com/dubhater/vapoursynth-nnedi3 [5]:https://github.com/frypatch/plex-media-optimizer https://github.com/frypatch/plex-media-optimizer

mvanbaak 5y ago

Sony PSN does show the 'van' in some places, and not in others. Apple, same story. Google, same story. Sometimes when it is supported, they capitalize it. It's a mess.

sambe 5y ago

People started to get a clue about this 5-10 years ago though. It used to be much worse. I recall having to deal with it daily and I don't think about it much any more - more like a weekly exception. In fact, now also I get some places trying to be too helpful to the point of being confusing. For example, a trainer store that auto-detects location and lists prices in GBP but sizes in US (without indication) and doesn't actually have an EU/UK distribution centre. So whoops it's going to take ages to arrive, it gets re-listed in USD at the final checkout, whoops again, 3% charge from my credit card, and then the wrong size arrives. But at least I knew the rough GBP amount!

mam3 5y ago

When is the last time you paid for a google service tho ? Its the height of millenial arrogance to think a compagny should give you a special treatment for free

smnrchrds 5y ago
Last time? About two months ago. Sidenote, I am not Dutch. Are you implying that Dutch people don't buy any services from Google?
- mam3 5y ago
  Ok for you... I was mostly saying most people don't pay in general for google products and yet complain about google

Fnoord 5y ago

In World of Warcraft, the Dutch word kunt gets censored because it is a variation of an English curseword. While in Dutch its a very basic word ('can' as in 'you can'). Customer Service rep. was aware of the issue but could not do anything about it. They are going to use AI in the game more for such moderation, so I hold my breath. Also, not sure what Spanish implies but Portuguese usually means Brazilian Portuguese. Dutch usually means Dutch, not Flemish, unless its a Belgian production.

markenqualitaet 5y ago
In the chat or in-game storry telling and such? Isn't 'cunt' also used much more casually in the UK and Australia? Cursewords and women's nipples... has their devilish impact on society ever been proven or rather is there even any evidence whatsoever? Why do we accept this idiotic censorship again?

xyzzy21 5y ago

Likely people at these companies never grokked that Localization is both nation and language - they conflate the two. That's a sad level of stupid.

blacklion 5y ago

> How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is. Exactly rule we've deduced with my wife in our trips in South-East Asia and out living in Russia. Fun story: In the middle of nowhere in Myanmar we'd stopped to eat in roadside shack (we'd travelled by motorcycle). Food was delicious, and my wife looked up Google Maps while we waited for ordered second dish. To our surprise, this shack was listed on GMaps. We wrote good review, why not? Google Map asks several additional questions, like «Is this place popular among the college crowd» and «Is this place wheelchair-accessible». Nearest college is about 500km to this place, 0.01% of children go to college, and wheelchairs, of course, could be pushed to this shack, as it has ground floor. I mean, no floor at all. It was very funny indeed. But most of the time same service behavior is not funny, but irritating.

LordAtlas 5y ago

As an Indian, it's especially annoying when websites just assume that I want the website in Hindi. We have 22 languages officially recognised in the Constitution, and a few hundred regional dialects, and Hindi is only spoken by 40% of the population. A lower percentage even reads it. I'm good with English, thanks. It's what I think in.